To recap what it was that got me interested in this in the first place - After years of watching nature documentaries on PBS and the Discovery Channel, you get the impression that humans are pathetic when compared physically to other animals, and that our success was due mainly to our big brains and cleverness. While I'm not arguing against the adaptablity those attributes have given us, about a year ago, I read about a study called "Endurance running and the evolution of Homo", written by Dennis M. Bramble & Daniel E. Lieberman (Nature 432:345-352), comparing humans to other animals in endurance running, and we actually compare quite favorably.

Since the above two pages cover the article very well, I won't go into it in much detail. But to give what I think is the "money shot" from the paper, below is a graph showing human running speeds compared to another good long distance runner, horses:

And here's a quote from PZ Meyers on his blog entry that I thinks puts our endurance running capabilities into good perspective, "Human ER [endurance running, i.e. still aerobic] speeds fall between 2.3 m s-1 (I must be somewhere around there) and 6.5 m s-1 (for an Olympic class marathoner), with typical speeds for a moderately fit jogger of 3.2-4.2 m s-1. In comparison, the trotting speed of a horse is about 3.1 m s-1, and once they hit 4.4 m s-1, they break into an anaerobic gallop. Over long distances, the average speed sustained by a horse is about 5.8 m s-1—which means that a well-trained, conditioned human being can keep up with or even outrun a horse if the race is sustained long enough."

So, as far as long distance running goes, humans can hold their own pretty well. But the popular sentiment seems to be that we're still lousy as far as sprinting goes, and that's where Pepe's paper comes in. Pepe's data compiled in the paper contained body mass, body length, and maximum relative running speed for each animal, where the relative running speed was defined as body lengths per second. In order to keep the trends relevant for running (to quote part of his paper), "Species with highly specialised habits and limb morphologies, such as arboreal and fully fossorial species, were excluded from the analysis."

One of his major results was to show that maximum relative running speed decreases with increased body mass, and to comue up with a trend describing the relationship.

Since his data was "maximum" running speed, it was exactly what I was looking for to compare human sprinting abilities with other animals in general, and not just comparing us to the fastest like documentaries commonly do. I took his data and input it into Excel, so I could do my own playing around with it. First was to reproduce his graph, to make sure I'd input the data properly. On my version of the graph, I've highlighted humans, so you can see where we fall. I've also highlighted the most famous of all sprinters, the cheetah.

Next, I took his figures for body length and maximum relative running speed, and calculated a maximum actual running speed. For this graph, I converted speed to mph, and body weight to pounds (since I'm an engineer, not a scientist, and these units make the data easier for me to grasp). Once again, I've highlighted humans and cheetahs.

So, after looking at the data this way, while humans are definitely at the low end of the range, we're certainly not outliers in the data. We fit in comfortably compared to other animals, actually sprinting faster than a few of the animals in our weight class. Taking into account our endurance running capabilities, I'd say that humans really aren't too bad of runners, after all.

I guess next it's time to try to compare us to the other animals in other ways, such as our senses, or maybe our strength. If it takes me as long to research another one as my blog entries typically take, expect another update in a few years.